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No. 42, April 2001 Based on *brg* No. 30, a fanzine for ANZAPA, 200th Mailing, and The Great Cosmic Donut of Life No. 28, a fanzine for Acnestis, by Bruce Gillespie, 59 Keele Street, Collingwood, Victoria 3066, Australia. Phone & fax: 61-3-9419-4797. Email: [email protected]. Cover graphic: Richard Dadd: The Fairy Feller's Master-stroke (Tate Gallery). ROUNDING UP THE SHAGGY DOGS: THE SHORT STORIES OF AVRAM DAVIDSON by Bruce Gillespie

First given as a talk to the Nova Mob, 7 March 2001, at the coast of America. During this period he published many home of Lucy Sussex and Julian Warner, Brunswick, Mel- short stories and sixteen , but never made any money. bourne, Victoria, Australia. That short biography contains the essence of the Avram Davidson : that he was an eccentric man who never ‘Avram Davidson? Who’s he?’ That’s been the reaction of made a cent because he wrote quirky stories that make several people when recently I mentioned I would be talking people chuckle. Discountable; not regarded as one of the about his work. The answer is in the anthology, The Avram giants of SF. If such a legend grows up around an author, Davidson Treasury, edited by and Grania people stop reading that author, which is what happened to Davis. Reading it set me reading every Avram Davidson Davidson during the seventies and eighties. I also stopped anthology I could find. Thanks, Alan Stewart, for lending me reading him. Therefore, like most other SF readers, I missed some that I did not have. And thanks, Grania Davis, for the out on the fact that year by year Davidson’s work kept energy you have invested in recent years into revealing the improving. Some of his very best stories were written just range of Avram Davidson’s work. before he died. Avram Davidson was born in 1923 in Yonkers, New York, It was not until I read the Avram Davidson Treasury that I and died in 1993 in Bellingham, , in poverty. He gained any idea of the complex reality of Davidson’s life and was in the US Navy during World War II, and on his way the true worth of his work. The Treasury is a particularly home visited China and, later, Israel during 1949, the year valuable resource, because of the care taken in its selection of its birth. He had returned to America by 1950. Beginning of stories and the range of writers chosen to comment on in his late teens, he became a strict Orthodox observer of the individual pieces. In his Foreword, here is co-editor Robert Jewish faith, and his early stories appeared in magazines, Silverberg’s recollection: such as Jewish Life and Commentary, primarily directed at Jewish . In 1954 he sold his first genre or Even though Avram had seemed to materialize among us science story, ‘My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello’, to The like a stranger from another world, there in the mid- Magazine of Fantasy & , and in 1958 made his 1950s, it turned out that he was in fact a New Yorker like name with a story called ‘The Golem’, also in F&SF. This tells the rest of us . . . Indeed he had been active in New York of an elderly couple, sitting outside their suburban home, science-fiction fandom in his teens — co-founder, no who are approached by a golem. They do what anybody less, of the Yonkers Science Fiction League. (I find the would do: wrote on the golem’s forehead and set him to concept of a teenage Avram Davidson as difficult to work mowing the lawns. Davidson’s other enduring suc- comprehend as the concept of the Yonkers Science Fic- cesses from that period include ‘Help! I Am Dr Morris tion League, but so be it.) . . . Goldpepper’ (1957), which tells of a dentist captured by aliens who force him to fit them with upper plates so they Born in 1923 — that means he was only thirty-five or so can move to America and claim welfare, and ‘Or All the Seas when I first met him at that unspecified party at an with Oysters’ (1958), which is based on the wonderful notion indeterminable time in the late 1950s. Which is hard to that safety pins are the pupae and coat hangers the larvae of believe now, because I think of thirty-five-year-olds these bicycles. In his introduction to the story in The Avram David- days as barely postgraduate, and Avram, circa 1958, son Treasury, Guy Davenport tells of students in his writing bearded and rotund and professorial, seemed to be at classes who have handed him garbled versions of the same least sixty years old . . . idea, not knowing where it has come from. Not many SF So we clustered around this curious little man at our stories become urban . parties and got to know him, and when his stories ap- Davidson led a restless life, constantly trying to find a peared we bought the magazines that contained them house cheap enough to fit his income, or other sources of and read them; and our appreciation, and even love, for income to finance his writing career. From 1962 and 1964 his work and for him knew no bounds. He was courtly he worked as by far the most interesting editor that The and droll. He was witty. He was lovable. He could be, to Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has ever had. While he be sure, a little odd and cranky at times (though not was editor, his introductions would sometimes grow longer nearly as much as he would come to be, decades later, in than the stories they were meant to introduce. As editor of his eccentric and cantankerous old age), but we under- F&SF, his most memorable achievement was publishing stood that geniuses were entitled to be odd and cranky. Roger Zelazny’s first hit story, ‘A Rose for Ecclesiastes’, accompanied by the finest SF magazine cover ever, by Here Silverberg gives me the clue to all of Davidson’s Hannes Bok. During this period he was living in a village in work — that he was born old and wise, except in aspects of Mexico. All the paperwork involved in editing F&SF was at his personal life. But that’s not quite the impression he gave the mercy of the Mexican and US post offices. Later, David- when his stories first became well known among SF fans. son lived for a while in British Honduras, now called , Because of the success of such stories as ‘The Golem’ and before moving in and out of rooming houses all over the west ‘Dr Morris Goldpepper’, he was regarded as an oddball

3 genius, rather than a real genius. His oddest stories are his well. He complained he had his own troubles, foot trou- earliest, and their eccentricity often made it difficult for bles . . . I scarcely listened, just chattered . . . Toes . . . readers to see their brilliance. In the late fifties and early something about his toes. Swollen, three of them, quite sixties, he really hoped to sell enough fiction to become a painful. A bell tinkled in my brain. I asked him how he success in the field, so he wrote too many stories of the wrong spelt his name. A-j-e-l-l-o. Curious, I never thought of that. sort. Many of his published pieces of that era were six-page Now, I wonder what he could have done to offend the sting-in-the-tail stories, clever but unmemorable. little girls? Chased them from in front of his store, per- haps. There is a distinct reddish spot on his nose. By If we want to judge the true ability of Avram Davidson, we tomorrow he will have an American Beauty of a pimple. can start at the beginning of his career. Take his first fantasy story, ‘My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello’, published in F&SF. All those shaggy dogs, the themes, are starting to be Its first paragraph is Joycean stream-of-consciousness writ- mustered. As this happens, they are becoming part of one ing, not at all the sort of thing one finds in SF magazines of . The narrator lying in bed works out that the girls the early fifties. A man is suffering from a disease, which he outside are junior sorceresses. One of their other calling calls Virus Y. We have no idea who he is, where he is living, games blesses a boy friend named Tony, ‘who eats macaroni, how he caught whatever he caught. ‘Oh dear, how my mind has a great big knife and a pretty little wife, and will always runs on. I must be feverish. An ague, no doubt.’ lead a happy life . . . that must be the butcher opposite; he’s The second paragraph begins: ‘Well, rather an ague than always kind to the children.’ a pox. A pox is something one wishes on editors . . . strange The narrator is a sensible chap. He takes out two dimes breed, editors.’ The story has switched direction entirely. and flings them out the window. He thinks: Will the story be about sickness or editors? The third paragraph begins: Too bad about Ajello, but every man for himself. Listen to them singing away, bless their little hearts! I love little ‘In front of the house two little girls are playing one of girls. Such sweet, innocent voices. those clap-handie games. Right hand, left hand, cross hands on bosom, left hand, right hand . . . it makes one My boy friend will soon be healthy. dizzy to watch. And singing the while: He shall be very wealthy. No woman shall harry My boy friend’s name is Jello, Or seek to marry; He comes from Cincinello, Two and two is four, and one to carry! With a pimple on his nose And three fat toes; It will be pleasant to be wealthy, I hope. I must ask And that’s the way my story goes! Ajello where Cincinello is.

There is a pleasing surrealist quality to this which Three and a half pages, yet here is the heart of Davidson’s intrigues me. In general I find little girls enchanting. genius: his shaggy dog stories metamorphose into lean wolf What a shame they grow up to be big girls and make our stories. In musical terms, it’s a merry mini-sonata that Mozart lives as miserable as we allow them, and oft-times more. might have written. Like much of the rest of Davidson’s fiction, it also proved to be autobiographical. Davidson’s The narrator then speculates about people who criticise relationships with women seem to have been uncomfortable Charles Lutwidge Dodgson for his attitude to little girls. Is throughout his life, except for his short marriage to Grania this the direction the story is taking? Kaiman who, even after many years of remarriage to Steve Only in paragraph four do we return to the theme of Davis, calls herself Grania Davidson Davis. He never became paragraph one: illness. If this story were music, this proce- wealthy. I get the impression that he was sick a lot. He lived dure might not be puzzling. It’s quite common to introduce in lots of boarding houses and rented houses. He often gave three different phrases at the beginning of a piece of music, dimes and dollars to unlikely people, especially when he was with the knowledge that the listener will allow the composer, himself down and out. at leisure, to stitch them all together. When a writer of fiction does this, we readers often don’t see how the themes are ‘The Spook-box of Theobald Delafont De Brooks’, the last stitched together. We say that he or she is writing a ‘shaggy story he wrote, appeared just after his death in 1993. It is dog story’, which the Macquarie Dictionary defines as a sixteen pages long, rather than three and a half pages. When ‘generally long and involved funny story whose humour lies you finish it, you feel as if you’ve read a . Yet it is also, in the pointlessness or irrelevance of its conclusion’. in essence, the same story as ‘My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello’. Davidson’s narrator begins to talk to the little girls, who For an Avram Davidson story, ‘The Spook-box’ has a are playing outside his window. In turn, this leads to specu- fairly straightforward beginning. The main earns lations about the other people in the hospital, or whatever, his living by collecting rents on old properties owned by old in which he is staying. He mentions a Miss Thurl, who brings Miss Whittier. For this privilege he is allowed free rent, which in supplies. Rain falls, gradually washing away the chalk for him is the difference between survival and poverty. marks of the girls’ game. Miss Thurl brings him tea. The narrator is a con artist. He is quite proud of way he A new theme emerges on page three of the story: can fool Miss Whittier into giving him privileges that enable him to make a bit of money on the side. He has one advan- I thank whatever gods may be that Mr Ahyellow came in tage over other people who might have tried to take advan- just then. The other boarder (upstairs), [hah! at last we tage of Miss Whittier’s vagueness: his name, Theobald discover that the narrator is living in the front room of Delafont De Brooks. In the world of this story, which is the bottom floor of a boarding house] a greengrocer, slightly off to one side from ours, Theobold De Brooks and decent fellow, a bit short-tempered. He wished me soon Grosvenor Delafont De Brooks had been presidents of the

4 United States of America. When people meet the narrator Here is the heart of the story, written in prose as chewy of the story, they assume that he has some close relationship and delicious as any to be found in American short fiction. with these presidents or their descendants. The main char- It tells how one man gradually comes to have a clear idea of acter assumes the same thing. There is one catch: nobody himself, after living a life of illusion. What is of most value? from the Delafonts or the De Brookses will admit that he is To read a lot of Avram Davidson is to find that old objects part of the family. He keeps sending letters to his putative and ideas are valuable, but they can also trap someone, as relatives. Theo De Brooks is trapped. At the time Davidson wrote this story, he was old and sick and poor, and must have known he would soon be dead. His life must have seemed to him No invitation to come boating or swimming at Muskrat one of ‘ungratified hopes and increasingly entrenched dis- Sump. No invitation to go golfing or riding at Parkill appointments’. For other writers, writers much less gifted Ridge. Oh well. Take what you can get. Hope for the Big than him, the main chance usually arrived at least once in Chance. Keep your powder dry. And — say — don’t life — a movie sale here, a bestseller there, a story that keeps knock it. On the strength of the Story Number One, on selling. But for a writer, there are no guarantees. There- Theobald De Brooks . . . floated into a job offered by an fore this story is the tale of coming to terms with a life lived uncle . . not much of a job, but it kept them in groceries in hope but without guarantees. and off Relief. See? The story ends as the main character is finally offered his main chance. The old patroon’s treasure chest (or ‘spook Where are the shaggy dogs in this story? We keep bump- box’), never opened, is traced to Theo, as the only surviving ing up against famous names, or at least, names that the relative. He is the only person who knows what it might main character believes are famous. Theobald has spent his contain. When he opens it, he finds that the old ancestor life surrounded in a cloud of family history, but the cloud had, during that lost month in his life, sold the jewels and never quite turns into rain. As people keep telling him, ‘If gold rumoured to be in the spook-box, in return for a box your name is De Brooks, why ain’t chew rich?’ Early in his full of Continental money. Totally worthless paper. Theo life, he asked his father, ‘How come all we’ve got are the asks himself: names?’ Nobody has an answer to that. His father remem- bers one possible connection, Phoebe Fisher De Brooks of Had he not wasted his life on a dead claim to a dead Fishkill, New York. A letter for a reference that would enable name? Was there not, waiting in the chest, one message Theo to obtain a scholarship ‘for the benefit of native-born of great worth? Lay thy burden down, it seemed to say. It American boys being of Holland Dutch descent’ brings only had to say something, didn’t it? a letter to the effect that ‘Miss De Brooks was absolutely unable to be of assistance even in regard to distant family This is a very moving story, all the more because it is not ties, and that she hoped that Theobald would meet with all clear what the shape of the story actually is until the last page the success to which his merits might entitle him’. or so. Also, it’s very funny. It’s not sour humour. It is rueful Theo becomes a jack of all trades, distributing cards that humour, a about one man’s self-delusion. But it’s claims he is in Real Estate and Business and Financial Man- not a gloomy story, because Theo invests so much energy agement. His name, his heritage, forever hangs around his into his life of delusion, which had given meaning to his life. neck, promising a chance that never comes. Theo’s story In the end, he can laugh out loud at himself. meanders. He tells the story, gleaned from a newspaper, of the ‘Missing Treasure of the Patriot Patroon’, a member of As I said at the beginning, Avram Davidson seemed old to the De Brooks family who sought to rescue a treasure from his contemporaries. In ‘My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello’, the advancing British troops during the Revolution. A month ritual of the girls’ pavement game is centuries old. It’s a piece later, he turned up, ‘tired, hungry, muddy, bloody, and of traditional magic that happens to touch upon the main exceedingly confused’. It was not clear whether or not he character. In ‘The Spook-box of Theobald Delafont De still had the treasure. All that connects the main character Brooks’, the main character is afflicted by an ancient asso- with the old treasure is a scrappy old letter he owns — his ciation of names, which he takes to be fortunate, but which only actual connection with the De Brooks. proves to be curse of his life. Avram Davidson wrote an entire As Theo’s hopes continue, his life winds down. He is book of articles about old things. Called Adventures in offered a chance to join a club of people who feel they have Unhistory, it displays his immense wealth of knowledge about distant relationships with old America, but turns it down: all things ancient, demonstrating how most such knowledge is based on mistaken observations. The legend of the mer- TDD, after a lifetime of ungratified hopes and increas- maid may or may not be based on sailors’ observations of the ingly entrenched disappointments, was no longer really manatee; the legend of the werewolf may or may not be sure of what he really wanted. But he was sure that it was based on ancient experiences of rabid wolves; and so on. not to become a part of a would-be cabal of unpensioned Davidson kept vast notebooks of his discoveries about every former railroad telegraphers, retired secretaries of down possible subject. at heel institutions, bankrupted salesmen of the bonds of Given that immense learning about the past can often obscure municipalities: seeking to revive the ghost of the lead a writer to commit unreadable pedantry, why do David- Know Nothings and secure for themselves a share of the son’s stories seem fresh? Why does Davidson the writer never openings for US vice-consulates and inspectorates of lose control of his shaggy dogs? intestate properties, to which their descents from militia A quick answer would be: because every page of a David- officers of the War of 1812 obviously entitled them . . . — son story raises a chuckle. The whole is funny because all the Was that how he seemed to others? he wondered — and minute parts of the story are funny. What, then, delights the wondering of it give him a very sharp pain whenever Davidson? I asked Elaine this. She said, ‘He loves the people he thought about it: and, after that, he thought about it he is writing about.’ Why are Davidson’s observations about often. people more interesting than those of many other writers?

5 Because Davidson values people who are usually forgotten Transbalkania is a wonderfully crazy place, full of people or despised by other people, and often by other writers. who survive through complex compromises and gimcrack Most of Davidson’s characters are middle-aged or old. arrangements. Davidson writes about Scythia-Pannonia- Some of his best stories are about feisty old women. In Transbalkania with such affection and detailed knowledge ‘Where Do You Live, Queen Esther?’ (1961), an old servant, that he seems to have felt it to be the country that America mistreated by the people she has served for many years, takes should have been. I won’t single out any stories, except to a wonderfully ingenious revenge, using a nice little bit of recommend them all, and hope you can find a copy of the traditional magic. In ‘The Woman Who Thought She Could Owlswick Press anthology, The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy Read’ (1959), an entire neighbourhood gangs up on an old (1990). Savour the geniality of Davidson’s world view: his woman who can foretell the future. The upright citizens do belief that all people are intrinsically interesting, and every- not listen to what she has to say; they think she’s a witch; and thing is forgivable but self importance. the narrator becomes her betrayer. However, ‘Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman’, the That’s a sombre story, as is the beginning of ‘Crazy Old Eszterhazy story that’s in the Treasury, is one of the most Lady’ (1976). In introducing the story in The Avram Davidson puzzling stories I’ve read, and solving it is not helped by Treasury, Ethan Davidson, the author’s son, recalls when he ’s introduction, which is as gnomic and puzzling was fourteen and living with his father in a house shared with as you would expect from Wolfe. Anybody who offers me a a blind man: sensible account of the meaning of the ending of this story, with or without Gene Wolfe’s help, will earn my undying Avram liked to move every few months, and I became gratitude. accustomed to living with all sorts of people. Most of If it’s still available, The Avram Davidson Treasury is a these people had something unusual about them . . . carefully edited and valuable introduction to this writer. Few One was even a crazy old lady. Even when he lived alone, of the people who introduce the individual stories tell us he sometimes brought in homeless derelicts or confused much that we can’t work out for ourselves, but some, like young people. Avram was sometimes irritable. But he , in his introduction to the story ‘Dagon’, are often also displayed quite a bit of compassion. really useful. The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy would be my Eighteen years have passed. The number of people next recommendation. who are poor, elderly, and live in bad neighborhoods has A recent anthology, Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven: increased tremendously. Essential Jewish Tales of the Spirit, edited by and Grania Davis, has all of Davidson’s early sketches and learner The story itself is just an elaboration of that proposition, stories, which appeared in Jewish Life and Commentary in the until it reaches its end, and we discover the delightful way in late forties and early fifties. Even the slightest of these which the Crazy Old Lady solves her problem of keeping a sketches, which are usually about Israel and the Adriatic roof over her head while avoiding the criminals who have countries in the late 1940s, are vivid and perceptive. Did moved into her neighbourhood. In writing this story, David- Davidson ever write an uninteresting sentence? I doubt it. son has dramatised one of his major themes, the deteriora- He was always brilliant, funny, and perceptive; in short, a tion of American thought and culture during the last thirty great American writer whose stories are still to be discovered. or forty years. Much of this deterioration has happened because of America’s insistence on forgetting what was — Bruce Gillespie, 6 March 2001 important in its past. To Davidson, the past is usually more complex and humane than the modern, and allows more BIBLIOGRAPHY possibilities for living the good life. This is the opposite of the prevailing weight of opinion in SF over the last sixty or Essential anthologies: seventy years: that the past is better than the present or Avram Davidson, The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, Owlswick future because there life is simpler and less complicated Press, Philadelphia, 1990, 366 pp. (The original set of than it is today. Eszterhazy stories, plus the ‘young Eszterhazy’ stories written a decade later.) In the Dr Eszterhazy stories, Davidson writes about his true Avram Davidson, ed. Jack Dann and Grania Davis, Everybody home of the spirit, the Triune Monarchy of Scythia- Has Somebody in Heaven: Essential Jewish Tales of the Spirit, Pannonia-Transbalkania, a mythical empire he says existed Devora Publishing, 2000, 285 pp. 10 contributors. somewhere in middle Europe before the First World War. Avram Davidson, ed. Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis, Its rickety political system unites not only the Scythians, The Avram Davidson Treasury, Tor, New York, 1998, Pannonians and Transbalkanians, but an endless variety of 447 pp. 41 contributors. other peoples and tribes, who have little time for each other but pay allegiance to the eccentric King-Emperor Ignats Read these if you can find them: Louis, friend and patron of Doctor Engelbert Eszterhazy, Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory, Owlswick Press, who has five doctorates, immense wealth, and can leave no Philadelphia, 1993, 307 pp. puzzle unsolved or piece of magic uninvestigated. In these Avram Davidson, Strange Seas and Shores, Doubleday, New stories, Davidson has done what we often like to do when York, 1971, 219 pp. writing or reading fantasy: relate the adventures of the Avram Davidson, What Strange Stars and Skies, , New person we would like to be. Doctor Eszterhazy is a loosely York, 1965, 188 pp. disguised Avram Davidson, but a Davidson with the money Avram Davidson, ed. Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff, to follow his interests without needing to kowtow to editors, The Investigations of Avram Davidson, St Martin’s Press, the connections to enable him to travel widely and meet all New York, 1999, 246 pp. types of people, and the wisdom to solve problems while Avram Davidson, ed. John Silbersack, Collected , staying modestly in the background. Scythia-Pannonia- , New York, 1982, 224 pp.

6 Whenever Crocodiles Appear More on Avram Davidson

Usually I avoid anything that resembles show biz, but once ing a collection as The Avram Davidson Treasury. It doesn’t a year I write and deliver a paper on something or other for have all the A. D. classics, as the Treasury has, but it is a small Melbourne’s Nova Mob, which just keeps on going and encyclopedia of unexpected insights — about Jewish life in going, 31 years after it was founded by John Foyster. I don’t general; about the startling multicultural experiment that like giving papers, but I like the stimulus of being forced to Davidson found in the fledgling Israeli republic; and about write at least one essay per year. I wish I could avoid giving Davidson’s own fiction. For instance, here’s his account of the paper, as people have to look at me instead of me looking the genesis of the Doctor Eszterhazy stories: at them. March’s Nova Mob was worse. I couldn’t see them. At the March meeting, enough people turned up, and Gradually it came to me that there had been an empire the weather was sufficiently warm, that we took our seats into in Eastern Europe which had been so completely de- the back yard of the Brunswick residence of Lucy Sussex and stroyed that we no longer even remembered it . . . that Julian Warner. There was a catch. Although the hot weather being an empire, it had an emperor; that the emperor hadn’t broken, the days were getting shorter. I began read- had a wizard; the wizard drove about the streets of Bella ing my talk. About half way down the first page, I realised (BELgrade/ViennA) in a steam runabout; . . . that the that shortly I would have to cut it short or start making it up. emperor’s name was Ignats Louis; and that the wizard’s I could hardly see the pieces of paper. I kept going. Suddenly name was . . . was . . . was Engelbert Eszterhazy . . . I sat the reliable frame of Julian Warner loomed at my side. He down at the typewriter, and in six weeks wrote all eight was carrying a portable lamp. When he switched it on, I stories of the first series. No rewrites were ever even could see my pieces of paper again, but I couldn’t see suggested . . . Everything came so clear to me, the bulg- anybody out there. ing eyes and bifurcated beard of Ignats Louis the fatherly When I had finished, and I could see the Nova Mobbers King-Emperor, the teeming streets of the South Ward of again, I realised that not only had many turned up who late Bella . . . and all the rest of it — came so clear to me — last year were presumed lost, stolen or strayed, but we had that now I recognize that I did not at all ‘make them up’, even gained a new person (Ros Gross, who reviews for my that Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania did exist!’ (p. 209) magazines from time to time). That was my little shot at show biz for the year. I wish I After I had written the talk for the Nova Mob, I realised could remember all the post-talk discussion. I do remember that Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania was not only a picture that Ian Mond, who observes Orthodox practice as strictly as of America as Avram Davidson would have liked it to have did Avram Davidson, asked what was specifically Jewish turned out (further evidence: ‘Take Wooden Indians’, one about Davidson’s fiction. How would I know? I enjoy the of Davidson’s most complex and deeply felt stories, as well American Jewish humour found in American popular cul- as stories he’s written about pre-Civil War New York) but it ture, such as Woody Allen’s scripts, or the work of certain resembles greatly the picture he gives in Everybody Has Some- Jewish fiction writers, such as Stanley Elkin, whose stories body in Heaven of Israel in 1949: a vast throng of disparate remind me greatly of Davidson’s. But it’s not my culture, and peoples, hating each other most of the time, but willing to some of the fascination of reading Davidson is seeing put up with each other in order to found a new common- America from an alien viewpoint. wealth. The only clue I have can be found in Peter Beagle’s tribute to Davidson (‘Avram and G–d’), in the anthology Avram Davidson was an idealist — a pestilentially prickly Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven: one, if I can believe all the stories told about him — but many of his ideals are also mine. My favourite piece of Davidson’s He used to tell me long, ridiculously involved shaggy-dog writing can be found in Carol Carr’s remembrance of Avram stories in Yiddish, always assuming (or pretending to Davidson in Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven: assume; who knew with that man?) that my command of the language was vastly more fluent than the handful of In 1983 my mother died. Avram: words and phrases that it is. But for all the twinkles and nuances that I missed as the tumbled by me, one For your pain and sorrow, I am painfully sorry. There is, line, appended by Avram to a particular , is with me however, I have noticed, usually, a certain measure of relief. And still, clear and cold and amused as the first time I heard for whatever relief you feel, feel therein neither pain nor sorrow. it. ‘Don’t ever believe that we Jews were chosen by God to be his Flow with it. Resume the voyage, float, float; and whenever people. We volunteered.’ (p. 145) crododiles appear, whack them on the snout with the paddle. (p. 153) I get the feeling, to answer Ian Mond’s question, that the most Jewish aspect of Davidson’s fiction is their form — the In memory of Avram Davidson, keep whacking those croco- shaggy-dog story. diles.

Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven is in many ways as stimulat- — Bruce Gillespie, 11 March 2001

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